Gordon Waddell: This Rangers regime is done the moment the silent majority speak out at Ibrox

GORDON looks back on a highly charged few days at Ibrox and at the silent majority of Rangers fans whose loyalty is severely tested.

"Fear is what Graham Wallace is relying on, playing on – because that fear is the only thing that’ll keep him in a job"

IN the end it’ll come down to the one commodity you don’t need cash or a credit card for. Trust.

We already know the loud minority have long since lost it. Now it’s about whether the silent majority join them.

The minute they do? This Rangers regime is done. More than that, though, their club as they know it is done. Again.

That fear is what Graham Wallace is relying on, playing on – because that fear is the only thing that’ll keep him in a job and his paymasters in the boardroom.

The idea that if the fans don’t support the club in the way they have for the past two years, if 35,000 of them don’t keep pitching up week in week out, regardless, they’ll have pushed their club over the precipice. That if a “significant” number of them fail the club in their hour of need, their position will become precarious.

It’s emotional blackmail, a ludicrous affront to a support whose loyalty has been the only commodity keeping the club alive. God knows it hasn’t been Wallace or anyone else’s management.

What’s “significant”? He wouldn’t say. He was asked five different ways from five different angles on Friday afternoon and he wouldn’t put a number on it. Five thousand? Ten? Half?

The bottom line is this, though. If even ONE floating Rangers supporter bought his ‘big boy did it and ran away but we’re the good guys, honest guv’ charter on Friday, they’re bigger mugs than I thought they were.

I wrote four months ago that unless the results of his 120-day review were something special, it would be seen as little more than an exercise in procrastination.

What he produced? The review aspect of it was an exercise in the bleedin’ obvious. That outrageous, stupid sums of money were blown, that pockets were lined on the back of that profligacy and that mismanagement had left them on the edge. No s***, Sherlock.

And the strategy? Pie in the sky planning predicated on little more than going to the same well they’ve already run dry in the hope of squeezing a few last drops from it.

Bad enough, then. But the fact he then tried to blame their lack of a credit facility for fans on the fans themselves, rather than their own lack of credibility as a going concern with First Data, should have been the final deception for your average right-thinking punter.

As I mentioned at the top, the loud minority have already made their feelings clear. They’re out there on social media, on forums, taking it to the board. The Union of Fans may not be complete, but they’re substantial.

The silent majority though? They’re the ones who just want to pay their money and watch the football on a Saturday. Who have no interests in the politics of the game as long as their rituals aren’t interrupted.

And there are plenty of them. Thousands who’ll not give a toss who’s in control, just that they have a team to watch.

If I was one of them, though? If it was my £400? Would I be handing it over right now – in cash, mind, in hard cash – to a group of people who aren’t prepared to offer you the kind of facility your local corner shop can? Not a hope.

Having read and re-read their review, having sat through an hour of Wallace talking to the dailies and the Sundays on Friday, having then gone over the 7000 words-worth of quotes he offered, I struggled to find a shred of solace to offer your rank-and-file fan.

He looked uncomfortable dodging questions about bonuses. He was disingenuous dealing with the credit card issue.

Remarkably, despite acknowledging the ludicrous nature of their football spending over the past two years, he’s still indulging his manager with claims the budget will get bigger next season.

He steadfastly refused to accept the rates he ‘negotiated’ on the Wonga-esque Laxey loan should be a source of regret and still peddled the line about it being market rates.

And he did it all sitting in the shadow of the latest six-figure spin doctor they’ve employed, while acknowledging that good people down the stairs would be losing their jobs as a consequence of their inability to control the money.

That’s not a foundation for trust.

The problem lies in the options. If the support baulks en masse, if the numbers are significantly down? He’s said they won’t indulge in a rights issue. He’s said they want to wait six months for an equity issue so they can prove their stability. No sniggering at the back, there...

So do they get themselves in an increasingly vicious circle of short-term debt to keep them going until then?

These are the consequences the support have to live with. Maybe trust does have a price. Ultimately, though, it has to be worth paying.

Unless you do something special, the two teams involved aren’t going to hit that number.

Instead of encouraging waverers with irresistible prices, they’ve made the brain-dead decision to set the standard ticket at £35.

Sorry, but that’s going to encourage not a single floating voter to turn out.

You’ll have 15, maybe 20,000 empty seats.

Why not set the price to fill the place? Appeal to the neutral? My old man used to go to cup finals and Rangers and Celtic Euro nights, not because he supported either but because they were big occasions.

Parents should want to take their kids along to a final but who’s going to at £35 a pop?

John Sibley/Action Images

Manchester United manager David Moyes

AMAZING, the lack of responsibility taken by anyone else at Man U this week other than Davie Moyes.

Awful succession planning by the board, Sir Alex never accepting culpability for the team he left, unprofessional conduct by sneering players – does no one else have a shred of guilt for their demise?

Still, there were a few damning stats, not least of which was 51 games played and 51 different teams picked. That shows a man who rather than not having his best available never knew what it was.

Craig Williamson/SNS Group

Hampden Park

IF the end product of our back page on the SPFL and SFA last week proved anything, it was this: Communication will always trump confrontation.

Why it had to get to the stage where they were all running for cover is anyone’s guess. But they got round a table, asked what each other wanted, and found a compromise that kept everyone happy.

HEARTS’ new strip has a touch of class about it – but not as big a touch as their call to leave it sponsor-free.

They’ve rightly recognised that having anything, far less a morally questionable payday loan company, across its chest on a top dedicated to their fabled team of 1914 would have been an affront. It’d be fitting if they sold enough of them to compensate for that.